Color Schemer Studio

Introduction

Color Schemer Studio is an intuitive application that lets you
play with all sorts of color combinations - as long as you choose
from any of the color choices that this product offers, you can
be reasonably sure that your finished color scheme will be based
on scientific color principles.

I had been looking for something similar for a long time now -
at our studio, we create tons of PowerPoint presentations and templates
and it's always difficult and time-consuming to come up with inspiring
color combinations while making sure that the resultant schemes
are always relevant to how PowerPoint uses its own Color Schemes
feature.

Although Color Schemer Studio has no PowerPoint integration in
the same way that it integrates with Adobe Photoshop or Corel Painter,
the program is closest to what I was looking for.

About Color Schemer Studio

Color Schemer Studio, as the very name suggests is a color oriented
application. This application can be used for creating new color
schemes by mixing the color values - behind the scenes, the program
ensures that good color combinations are chosen
based on color theory.

The product is from the company of the same name. My contact at
Color Schemer was Aaron Epstein - thank you, Aaron.

You can download a trial version of Color
Schemer Studio from their site... They have both Windows and
Mac versions available - and also a free online version! For this
review, I'm working with the Windows version.

Working with Color Schemer Studio

Color Schemer Studio launches with the interface that you can
see in the screenshot below:

Figure 1: An easy, intuitive interface

The interface is easy - I could get working with the product within
a few minutes.

The interface has three panels:

Base Color,

Matching Colors, and

Favorite Colors

Base Color is the starting point - typically
this would be your PowerPoint background slide color. You
can input this color value by typing or choosing its hex value
or the RGB value of the color.

The Matching Colors panel provides a
visual color wheel which dynamically adds swatches of coordinating
colors that work well with the base color. This is a great place
to choose colors for all your chart and fill colors in a PowerPoint
slide. Various color harmonies
such as monochromatic, analogous, etc. are available for you to choose
from.

Finally, when you like a color, just drag the swatch to the Favorite Colors panel to create your color scheme
- that's all you need to do!

For text colors, Color Schemer Studio suggest
possible text color depending on good contrast and visibility
of text. Just make sure you select the base color you need, and
then choose the Tools | Color Schemer Analyzer option to summon
the dialog box that you can see in Figure
2.

Figure 2: See a preview of which text color works best.

Once the text and fill colors are selected, save your color scheme
as a Color
Schemer file (.cs). Since you are creating a color scheme for use
in a PowerPoint presentation, you'll have to select eight colors
- these are:

Background color - this would be your base color in Color Schemer
Studio

Text color

Shadow color

Title text color

Fill color (Accent)

Fill color (Accent)

Fill color (Hyperlink)

Fill color (Visited Hyperlink)

The same color scheme can also be exported into popular color
scheme formats such as Photoshop color swatches, HTML color
charts , color sets for Corel Painter, and many more formats. Unfortunately,
there's no automatic way to inject those color schemes within a
PowerPoint presentation, but since you already know which colors
to use, it's just a matter of time going and choosing the same
color values in PowerPoint.